One of the most frequent used techniques in statistics is linear regression where we investigate the potential relationship between a variable of interest (often called the response variable but there are many other names in use) and a set of one of more variables (known as the independent variables or some other term). Unsurprisingly there are flexible facilities in R for fitting a range of linear models from the simple case of a single variable to more complex relationships. Read the rest of this entry »
Simple Linear Regression
April 23rd, 2010R and Tolerance Intervals
April 19th, 2010Confidence intervals and prediction intervals are used by statisticians on a regular basis. Another useful interval is the tolerance interval that describes the range of values for a distribution with confidence limits calculated to a particular percentile of the distribution. The R package tolerance can be used to create a variety of tolerance intervals of interest. Read the rest of this entry »
Summarising data using scatter plots
April 18th, 2010A scatter plot is a graph used to investigate the relationship between two variables in a data set. The x and y axes are used for the values of the two variables and a symbol on the graph represents the combination for each pair of values in the data set. This type of graph is used in many common situations and can convey a lot of useful information. Read the rest of this entry »
Working with themes in Lattice Graphics
April 12th, 2010The Trellis graphics approach provides facilities for creating effective graphs with a consistent look and feel and one of the good things about the system is the use of themes to define the colour, size and other features of the components that make up a graph. The lattice package in R is an implementation of the approach and in this post we will consider how to change the default settings. Read the rest of this entry »
Summarising data using histograms
April 11th, 2010The histogram is a standard type of graphic used to summarise univariate data where the range of values in the data set is divided into regions and a bar (usually vertical) is plotted in each of these regions with height proportional to the frequency of observations in that region. In some cases the proportion of data points in each region is shown instead of counts. Read the rest of this entry »
Summarising data using dot plots
March 26th, 2010A dot plot is a type of display that compares counts, frequencies, totals or other summary measures for a series of categories. The dot plot can be arranged with the categories either on the vertical or horizontal axis of the display to allow comparising between the different categories as well as comparison within categories where there are multiple symbols used to denote say different years. Read the rest of this entry »
Measuring the length of time to run a function
March 16th, 2010When writing R code it is useful to be able to assess the amount of time that a particular function takes to run. We might be interested in measuring the increase in time required by our function as the size of the data increases. Read the rest of this entry »
Two-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)
February 15th, 2010The analysis of variance (ANOVA) model can be extended from making a comparison between multiple groups to take into account additional factors in an experiment. The simplest extension is from one-way to two-way ANOVA where a second factor is included in the model as well as a potential interaction between the two factors. Read the rest of this entry »
One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)
February 3rd, 2010Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) is a commonly used statistical technique for investigating data by comparing the means of subsets of the data. The base case is the one-way ANOVA which is an extension of two-sample t test for independent groups covering situations where there are more than two groups being compared. Read the rest of this entry »
The Grammar of Graphics: ggplot2 package
December 14th, 2009The grammar of graphics approach to constructing graphs has been implemented in the ggplot2 package in R. The author of the package, Hadley Wickham, has provided a website with many details of using the system to create nice looking graphics. Read the rest of this entry »
